Leah Remini Celebrates NYU Enrollment, Claims Scientology ‘Interrupted’ Her Education

usmagazine.com:

Reflecting on a milestone. Leah Remini is thrilled to be working toward her associate degree, but she can’t help thinking about how her time with the Church of Scientology affected her education.The King of Queens alum, 51, posted a throwback photo of herself via Twitter on Sunday, January 16, and shared some memories of her life at 16, the age she was in the picture. “I was ready to take on the world,” she wrote. “But by this point, I had been living the life of an adult for years even though I was a kid.”The Troublemaker author went on to claim that she received no “formal education for years” before the photo was taken. “Instead, I had been working for years so that I could support myself and my family,” she continued. “For the last 38 years of my life, I have been living and working with an 8th grade education.”Instead of going to school, Remini worked at an insurance company and later began pursuing an acting career. “I saw a successful acting career as a salvation,” she tweeted on Sunday. “It would help me get my family out of poverty and give me a higher standing in Scientology which I truly believed was helping to save mankind.”After years of struggle, the Second Act star became a successful actress — though she had to work on softening her thick Brooklyn accent. “Had you told me then that I would be a student at NYU at age 51, I wouldn’t have believed it,” she added. “I had big dreams back then but when I look back they were rooted in my desire to survive … I couldn’t have imagined a world in which I would be a university student at my age.”The Kevin Can Wait veteran announced last year that she had been accepted to New York University for an associate’s program in liberal arts.“For someone like me, a person who